Blog Timeline

On the 20th November 2018, Firefly International will hold its 5th annual fundraiser at the Actors Church, Covent Garden. This is a film of our centre in Antakya, Turkey. These Syrian refugee children are in an Arabic literacy class. Please help us to meet the huge demand for our programmes...

It’s less than a month to go before the Firefly International Gala on Tuesday 20th November and our silent auction is now live! We have some fantastic prizes: jewellery from Coco & Kinney, a signed cookbook from the River Café’s Joe Trivelli, a week in a luxury house in Italy, or South France or a cosy...

Emily Keen, a young professional documentary maker, volunteered to travel to Bosnia and make this film for us this summer. She has captured the importance of Svitac’s work in Bosnia brilliantly and why we need to continue to support and enable this work to continue in these difficult times.

The education centre in Antakya has seen some exciting progress in the last few months. Thanks to the staff developing strong and effective education programmes, more children have been attending courses and re-engaging with education. The recently introduced online teacher training courses mean that the summer programme reached over 800...

Art4Space UK, Svitac (Firefly) and Firefly International came together in 2013 to create a mosaic logo for the Youth Centre. Thanks to Firefly International, they have been able to come together to create another work of art. The project, initially funded by the Edith M Ellis Trust, was matched in funds...

On Midsummers night in Edinburgh Firefly hosted a supper club for 50 people at our local café, Century General Store. Charlie McMicking and Bill Coles cooked up a feast and Maria Chambers and Harry Crawley gave wonderful rousing speeches, about the work that Firefly’s partners do in Bosnia, Syria and...

Thank you very much for your support Anju! Anju Uppal has just returned from Kathmandu, after climbing to the Everest Base Camp at a height of 5346 metres! Her brave and generous endeavour has raised over £700 for Firefly International children.

Our partner in Bosnia, Svitac hosted a group of participants from the World Life Experience project between April 9-19th. World Life Experience takes 11 people around the world for 1 year: travelling, discovering, interacting and working with local people and organisations. We are very grateful to the World Life Experience team...

Over the May Bank Holiday, 8 teams of keen walkers took on a huge challenge – and raised £8000 for Firefly. The first mountain, Ben Nevis, was snowy with very low cloud and proved quite a challenge. The sun came out for Scafell Pike and Snowdon which helped everyone along....

Firefly Syria’s students have had many years of interrupted, or simply no education, due to the war. As a result it is commonplace for Syrian refugee children to be at a learning level three or four years behind their age group, and many are even illiterate. Yet, they have high...

Firefly Syria is a refugee led initiative which owes its success to the personal stories, struggles and resilience of the people it is made up of. The Story of Um S and her family Um S is employed at the Firefly centre in Antakya as a cleaner. Um S has...

Over the last four months, local refugee staff at our centre in Antakya have been looking for ways to outreach other teachers inside Syria. We are now thrilled to announce the success of their wonderful initiative. Our local refugee staff have designed a teacher online training programme and a fifty-two page...

Our projects coordinator – Maria Chambers – visited our centre in Antakya this October, bringing back great news! “It was just so wonderful to see the way the Applied science programme has developed. Top quality resources have been made at the centre that support the curriculum developed by our staff. They...